London Review of Books

Blowing over the top of a bottle of San Pellegrino

Adam Mars-Jones: Protest Dance Pop, 15 December 2005

Plat du Jour
by Matthew Herbert.
AccidentalShow More

“... but the sheer coincidence of a Jacobean dramatist and a legendary director sharing the name John Ford. So perhaps it takes a formalist to know one. But the contemporary formalist whose approach converges most sharply on Herbert’s is the sculptor Cornelia Parker. For a piece called Measuring Liberty with a Dollar (1998), for instance, Parker took a ...”

Unpranked Lyre

John Mullan: The Laziness of Thomas Gray, 13 December 2001

Thomas Gray: A Life
by Robert Mack.
Yale, 718 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 300 08499 4Show More

“... Mr Gray’, or some equivalent. By one account, when, near the end of his life, Gray visited St John’s College to meet the son of an acquaintance, ‘every College man took off his cap as he passed, a considerable number having assembled in the quadrangle to see Mr Gray, who was seldom seen.’ Gray managed the difficult feat of becoming admired, even ...”

Emotional Sushi

Ian Sansom: Tony, Nick and Simon, 9 August 2001

One for My Baby
by Tony Parsons.
HarperCollins, 330 pp., £15.99, July 2001, 0 00 226182 0Show More

How to Be Good
by Nick Hornby.
Viking, 256 pp., £16.99, May 2001, 0 670 88823 0Show More

Little Green Man
by Simon Armitage.
Viking, 246 pp., £12.99, August 2001, 0 670 89442 7Show More

“... hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Shakespeare (although to be fair they despise the comedies and some of the ...”

His Galactic Centrifuge

Edmund Gordon: Ballard’s Enthusiasms, 23 May 2024

Selected Non-Fiction: 1962-2007
by J.G. Ballard, edited by Mark Blacklock.
MIT, 386 pp., £30, October 2023, 978 0 262 04832 3Show More

“... he’d done more than anyone to establish was headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic. John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines. Attempts to revive the domestic scene failed to gather momentum until 1954, when New Worlds – a former ...”

On Thatcher

“... debate alternatives within its framework. It is essential to demythologise ‘Thatcherism’.Tony Blair, 29 October 1987With Mrs Thatcher safely in the lead, that voice and the little scuttling walk threatening to lead us into the next century, Conservative commentators like P. Worsthorne feel it now safe to admit that perhaps there is just a little truth ...”

Alleged War Criminals

Michael Byers: Saddam, Milosevic and Sharon, 22 July 2004

“... However, the delay makes it quite possible that Bush’s sworn enemy will be tried and executed on John Kerry’s watch, and that a Kerry administration will have to deal with the consequences in an already volatile Middle East. Saddam might even be denied the right to choose his legal representives; under existing Iraqi law, only Iraqi, Syrian and Palestinian ...”

Out of the Pound Loney

Ronan Bennett: The demonising of Gerry Adams, 5 March 1998

Man of War, Man of Peace? The Unauthorised Biography of Gerry Adams
by David Sharrock and Mark Devenport.
Macmillan, 488 pp., £16.99, November 1997, 0 333 69883 5Show More

“... cruelly short-changed. Many of the graver allegations are familiar, borrowed, for example, from John Ware’s 1983 documentary, The Honourable Member for West Belfast, which relied heavily on the evidence of Peter McMullen, an army deserter who joined the IRA and was at that time fighting extradition from the US (we aren’t told that McMullen later said ...”

A Furtive Night’s Work

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s working habits, 20 October 2005

1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
by James Shapiro.
Faber, 429 pp., £16.99, June 2005, 0 571 21480 0Show More

“... a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II just before the abortive coup, without addressing Blair Worden’s arguments in the LRB of 10 July 2003 that the play in question was not Shakespeare’s at all). Shapiro then glances at the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, and considers, finally, Shakespeare’s literary and theatrical immortality. This ...”

Up the Garden Path

R.W. Johnson: Michael Foot, 26 April 2007

Michael Foot: A Life
by Kenneth O. Morgan.
Harper, 568 pp., £25, March 2007, 978 0 00 717826 1Show More

“... were serious intellectuals, and I can’t get used to the idea of a pantheon that includes Cherie Blair, with or without her lifestyle adviser. Or Jim Callaghan, that dire waxwork who embodied the terrible fate of the old dreams of social democracy: Tom Nairn’s phrase about ‘the full medicine pill misery’ of having to ‘behold the gartered ...”

It was worse in 1931

Colin Kidd: Clement Attlee, 17 November 2016

Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee
by John Bew.
Riverrun, 668 pp., £30, September 2016, 978 1 78087 989 5Show More

“... black hair and dark moustache, produced a quirky resemblance to Lenin. Although his biographer John Bew finds the likeness ‘somewhat forced’, he notes that contemporary observers as different in their politics as George Orwell and the Daily Mail made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David ...”

Longing for Mao

Hugo Young: Edward Heath, 26 November 1998

The Curse of My Life: My Autobiography
by Edward Heath.
Hodder, 767 pp., £25, October 1998, 0 340 70852 2Show More

“... of the old, generous, socially concerned Conservatism that Margaret Thatcher destroyed and neither John Major nor William Hague has done anything to re-create. While most other believers in this brand of Toryism, not only from Heath’s generation but the next two, have slipped away, to the House of Lords and points east, this old, old man, 83 next ...”

Disappearing Ink

Tom Stevenson: Life of a Diplomat, 10 August 2023

And Then What? Inside Stories of 21st-Century Diplomacy
by Catherine Ashton.
Elliott and Thompson, 256 pp., £20, February 2023, 978 1 78396 634 9Show More

“... outposts, white ones sent to London from missions abroad – are full of entertaining examples. John Russell’s 1967 dispatch from Brazil begins: ‘Like the surface of the moon Rio is short of water, covered in dust and pocked with deep holes.’ American diplomats wrote of hotels in Xilin which provided contraception as standard and noted ‘no mention ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2004, 6 January 2005

“... escapades or of other people’s bad behaviour, a favourite being how, after a performance in John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me at Chichester for which he had been much praised, Alan was sitting in his dressing-room when there was a tentative knock on the door. It was Alec Guinness. He shook Alan’s hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and ...”

What I Heard about Iraq

Eliot Weinberger: Watch and listen, 3 February 2005

“... biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given’. I heard Tony Blair say: ‘We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd.’ I heard the president say: ‘We know that Iraq and al-Qaida have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. We’ve learned that Iraq ...”

An Escalation of Reasonableness

Conor Gearty: Northern Ireland, 6 September 2001

To Raise up a New Northern Ireland: Articles and Speeches 1998-2000
by David Trimble.
Belfast Press, 166 pp., £5.99, July 2001, 0 9539287 1 3Show More

“... in these programmes, ‘we had arrived big-time on the political scene.’ Adams and the SDLP’s John Hume together worked out the theological basis for what, after many drafts, was to become the British-Irish Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 – the document which paved the way for the IRA ceasefire of August 1994. The programmes give most of the ...”

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